Oil spills are a major environmental hazard. Particularly, oil spills in water bodies cause billions of dollars in losses, which includes cost of lost oil, environmental remediation after oil spills, losses to businesses in coastal areas and legal costs to name a few. For example, it is estimated that the 1979 Ixtoc 1 oil spill cost about $ 1.3 Billion, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill cost about $ 6.3 Billion, and the most recent Deepwater Horizon oil spill cost over $ 47 Billion. Effective remediation has the potential to dramatically reduce these costs. Various technologies are used for recovering surface oil spills, that is, oil floating on the surface of a water body. These include for example skimming, which is a slow and tedious process, burning, which has significant environmental consequences itself, and dispersing using chemical dispersants, which can be toxic to aquatic life and does not directly eliminate the oil but rather causes it to submerge as droplets.
Beyond oil on the water surface, a significant portion of the spilled oil can be submerged below the surface of the water body. This can be due to a sub-surface oil source as is often the case in oil spills emanating from offshore rigging accidents. This can also occur following treatment with dispersants or simply as a result of oil components with density greater than that of the water in which the spill occurs. There does not exist a reliable technology for removing and recovering submerged oil, particularly submerged oil from water columns of fast moving water located in riverine or near shore environments in depths of up to two hundred feet.